Test-Anxiety, inferential reasoning and working memory load

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Richards, Anne; French, Christopher C.; Keogh, Edmund and Carter, Corrin. 2000. Test-Anxiety, inferential reasoning and working memory load. Anxiety, Stress & Coping, 13(1), pp. 87-109. ISSN 1061-5806 [Article]

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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10615800008248335

Abstract or Description

Subjects high and low in test-anxiety were presented with an inferential reasoning task requiring the verification of necessary and unnecessary inferences. The task was performed whilst holding either two or six digits in memory. On the verification task, the performance of high-test-anxious subjects was slower and less accurate than that of the low-test-anxious subjects. In addition, unnecessary inferences took longer to process than necessary inferences for the high-test-anxiety group only. The high-test-anxious subjects studied the memory loads for longer than the low-test-anxious group, but their recognition accuracy did not differ. Findings support Eysenck and Calvo's (Cognition and Emotion, 6, 409-434, 1992) processing efficiency theory. The high-test-anxious group's performance on the sentence verification task was impaired overall, and was particularly impaired when performing the unnecessary inference task. However, we also demonstrated that the high-test-anxious group's performance on a secondary memory task was unimpaired as a result of increased effort.

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Article

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https://doi.org/10.1080/10615800008248335